Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Slumbering Ursine Dunes Is A-Comin'

I've jibber jabbered here and there
about the Slumbering Ursine Dunes, the Mythical Wilderness sub-region
of the campaign that I have been slowly, slowly, slowly turning into
a mini-sandbox for public consumption.

Longtime readers will have probably
noticed that I have also spent a good chunk of time here on the blog
and on Google Plus raising criticisms of the excesses of the rpg
crowd-funding way and the commercialization of our hobby. As I gear
up for horror of horrors a modest Kickstarter in early September I
also gear up for not being a complete ass of a hypocrite.

So here's what you can expect as
counter-measures against douchery in the Kickstarter:

1. That when it goes live the
manuscript will be in a “pre-print” done state. It is currently
in its fifth round of aggressive editing and the two tireless
editors, Robert Parker and Anthony Picaro, have done the Lord's work
in whipping my lazy, indulgent 50-plus digest-sized pages of text
into some coherence. There will be no getting stuck in the
hard-to-maintain cycle of motivating, writing, playtesting--and
avoiding your collective wrath as a result.

2. A bottom $1 or 2 “test drive”
tier where you can get the artless PDF immediately (all tiers will
get this but I wanted to give folks something my cheap and picky self
would want.)

3. A lot of thought has gone into the
project not getting bogged down in the usual morass of crowdsourcing
delays (and excuses). Higher backer-tiers and stretch goals have been
kept modest with an eye on being able to be put together at a
reasonably quick pace. Importantly the print publication will be done
through RPG Now/RPG Drive-Thru's print-on-demand with an at-cost
coupon being sent to backers thus reducing the major delaying woes of
printing and fulfillment. (It also means that UK backers can get
domestic shipping rates.)

4. That a sizable chunk of the budget
is going to pay first the talented David Lewis Johnson (who has also played in the campaign) for gorgeous art and cartography. Another quarter-percentage chunk is
going to pay for the editing and layout (yay Mike Davison). While
KS's skimpy restrictions don't allow you to directly fund-raise most
if not all of what I take all the end of that pie will be going to
pay for the filing and legal costs of reviving Hydra, my hippy-ideal
game design cooperative, as a worker-owned company (more about that
later in the week).

The Golden Barge cover (adventurers likely to disappear)

But enough about the hand-wringing,
here are the fun things you can expect from the Dune:

A pointcrawl of the otherwordly
Dunes region. Beyond the big ticket adventure sites you will find
along the way include a Polevik-haunted rye field, a Zardoz
head-living hermit (that scraggly fellar above), bearling pilgrimage
site and other assorted madness.

Two separate “dungeon” sites,
the biomechanical, lost-in-time Golden Barge and the warring
demi-gods Glittering Tower, with enough detail and portability to be
slotted into an existing campaign (as can many of the adventure
nodes).

A subsystem for modeling the mythic
weirdness of the Dunes in the Chaos Index, a dynamic events
systems. Actions of the players in the sandbox will escalate or
deescalate the levels of events from blood-rain thunderstorms to an
aerial invasion of magictech bubble cars.

Four competing factions
operating inside the Dunes, plus guidelines for their mutual
interactions.

Unique, “unlockable” player
classes, spells and magic items compatible with Labyrinth Lord or
really any other oldish D&D game.

15 new and unique monsters, many
drawn from Slavic mythology (with a twist or three, naturally).

Some flipping great cover and
interior art by David.
Check out some of the early sketches.

I can't see this not being worth your time and ours. If you weren't planning to pull out all the stops structurally and visually, it would still be a little piece of magic, especially for all the work and play that's gone into it and constantly having it there as a backdrop and a source of inspiration for so many years, but if you are, even better. I hope this is the first of many elements and we get to see much more of the world. Good news about Hydra too - carpe diem whatever the world and its calendar.